Before Dispatch came out, I was pretty confident that the era of the Telltale-style game was in the past; we had a bit of a golden age there, sure, what with The Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, and the shockingly good Tales From the Borderlands. But after Telltale's wobble and the shockingly-less-good New Tales From the Borderlands, I figured they'd gone the way of the dodo.
I was super wrong. Dispatch, per AdHocStudio's Bluesky account, has hit two million players: "We're also sad there are no new episodes this week, but thank you to the two million players that have joined us so far. Wouldn't be here without you."
We're also sad there are no new episodes this week, but thank you to the 2 million players that have joined us so far. Wouldn't be here without you. Art by Derek Stratton.
— @adhocstudio.com (@adhocstudio.com.bsky.social) 2025-11-20T11:33:01.012Z
That comes fresh on the heels of the fact that Dispatch hit its 3-year sales target in just as many months. All in all, AdHoc and Critical Role have shot a dose of adrenaline back into the genre, and I'm here to use my divine powers of gamer understanding to tell you why: It's, uh, it's pretty good.
Okay, in seriousness, Dispatch does a couple of things differently from its predecessors—it's both more and less of a videogame than Telltale's old roster. More in that there's an actually-solid, well-built dispatch management simulator under the hood, less in that, outside of that sim, Dispatch is basically a TV show.
There are no walkaround segments, no classic adventure game item usage, and the quick-time events are mostly superfluous, bar some hidden scores. It even follows a far more TV-show-like structure: Eight episodes, released in batches of two every week, that are all short n' sweet.
Consider, in contrast, the OG The Walking Dead's schedule: Episode 1 released back on April 24, 2012, and the season wrapped in November of the same year. Granted, the episodes were much longer, but I reckon it's a lot harder to keep fans invested when it takes seven to eight months for the full yarn to be spun.
Most importantly, though? It's just good TV. As our own Fraser Brown pointed out in his Dispatch review, it's "a celebration of classic heroic stories, and the surprising ability for characters rooted in comic books to reveal something about ourselves or challenge us to be better." Nothing about Dispatch works if the story sucks, and it, crucially, sticks the three-point landing.
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